A Hard Day's Life

Not Linear but Disruptive

My Dad died, a victim of Alzheimer’s as did his Dad before that. Both lived well into their 90s. I have wondered all these years if the same thing would happen to me. I’m not sure I am condemned to Alzheimer’s; what I do know is I keep meticulous records about everything that happens in my life. I am a journalist and a journalism teacher, so I have notes…some old-style, on pen and paper, though increasingly on laptops and phones.

But that’s a digression. What I want to share is a concern that Alzheimer’s is a little understood condition. I refuse to call it a disease because there is simply no treatment. My intuitive grasp of the condition is it means you have no shared memories and therefore no friends or relatives. As such, the Alzheimer’s patient is denied nostalgia.

I am a huge fan of nostalgia and my life has been spent tracking and befriending people I knew as a child and beyond. So the initial rush was fine…we met or conversed on email and various other social media platforms…and I, for one, was delighted. In many cases, we even had several occasions to meet personally. Then reality set in…after the initial rush, the connect fizzled. Nostalgia is like a third-world currency…it fades soon enough.

After all these years, when I made it a mission to get in touch with old friends, I have come to realize a drink and dinner is great fun with people from the past…there is really nothing beyond that. So you share the old school tie, the shared neighborhood and the pranks and some old stories that can be told once, maybe twice. Beyond that, there is no connect…everyone has their own lives

So fine, nostalgia can only go far. But it’s made me think…when I was born in Surat, then lived on Juhu Beach, Warden Road, Byculla Bridge, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago and then finally Delhi…all these lives I have tried to understand as seamless…a temporal progression…as in the history books we were taught in schools. Perhaps they weren't.

I now have come to understand that continuum is simply a timeline construct put on our lives. Fact is in Surat, Bombay, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago, I lived in different worlds. Increasingly, I am beginning to challenge the connective geometry of space and time. In the end, these phases of my life may not be a natural progression. These experiences are not unified in a single historical narrative; that life may be an agglomerate of experiences that have nothing to do with each other and that you are the only common factor.

Changes that take place in a human life, both internally and externally, are huge. I. for one, seem to have nothing in common with the four-year-old growing up on Juhu Beach. As such, our lives are really not a smooth progression from birth to death.

Not to get too esoteric, the point I want to make is all of us have disjointed lives, especially those who have the chance for mobility. I can remember going to a village in Gujarat with my friend from Chicago. What was most interesting he met a friend in the bazaar, who ran a kiosk and offered us a free Coke. This is someone he grew up with; my friend went on to become an influential doctor in Chicago but his buddy, like his family before him, still ran a small shop…the past (my friend’s) running into the present (his friend’s); different as night and day; today and yesterday.

I am no philosopher but I am increasingly convinced that work needs to be done to question, if not challenge, the assumption that individual lives are a serial progression from birth to death. My life from the 1950s onward has changed so dramatically, it takes old songs, movies and photographs to make it hold together.

The idea that it is a single life, a single person that journeys from birth to death is worth questioning. The links between the various phases are man-made; there is continuity in empirical terms. Just looking at my own experiences, I can see that a linear framework does not adequately describe my life.

In the decades I have lived on this planet, I have seen changes from where I wrote on a slate with chalk to a holder dipped in ink to a fountain pen to a ballpoint pen to a typewriter to a computer to a phone; from 78 rpm records on a crank-operated record player to an Ipod; from copious “hard copy” files to cloud storage.  The changes are disruptive in the sense they presaged completely new ways of doing things.

Disruptive defines, in my mind, the new understanding of my life. Everything changes…you can say it was thus in the 1950s, 1960s et al. Aside of my own memories, I find no connect between the guy who ran around on the beach and the guy who shivered in the Chicago cold and the guy who now battles life in Delhi.

Why the Congress Party was destroyed

It’s a bit of a long story, so you will have to bear with me.

In November 1981, I met Rajiv Gandhi, who had just given up his job in Indian Airlines because he had “to help Mummy” somehow. I lived in the US then but managed to get an interview with him. On a crisp November afternoon, my first-ever trip to Delhi; I walked into One Akbar Road.

The meeting was set for 2 pm. I waited in the outer office for a few minutes. He came out wearing a blue-checked shirt and the most perfectly-tailored blue jeans I’d ever seen. Used to buying jeans from the racks of Levi stores, I was struck…what a perfect fit!

“Hi,” he said. It was the beginning of a relationship that eventually brought me back to India after spending the most part of the 1970s and 1980s in the US. We became good friends. In 1987, when he came to the US, I met him.

“So are you a millionaire?” he asked me.

“Huh?” I responded.

“Well, you come to Delhi so often. Just come back and stay,” he told me.

So we moved lock, stock and barrel to Delhi in December 1987.

He was the Prime Minister then and I was giddy at 38 years of age to have unfettered access to the Prime Minister of India. Over the years, he was good to me, taking me on trips abroad and in India on his prime ministerial plane. I saw the world and India from rarefied heights.

And there were more such amazing privileges, including meeting world leaders, being personally introduced to them by India’s dashing new Prime Minister: Ronald Reagan, Hafez Assad of Syria, big guns in Germany, France, Hungary, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.

Heady times for a 40-year old.

Two decades later, I sit and worry that the saffron party with an absolute majority might make life difficult for me and my family. As a Gujarati, I never bought into Narendra Modi’s impressionist painting of Gujarat as some sort of an El Dorado. And have said so in the newspapers and on television.

Should the new dispensation seek to hound opponents, I am a sitting duck
.

But what is sad, and which explains why they were destroyed, is the Congress, in the past year, has practiced what a perceptive journalist called “bad faith politics.” The leadership remained inaccessible, surrounded as they were by the palace guard.

From 1997 through 2004, I met Mrs Sonia Gandhi regularly, sometimes even every day, not for any political purpose but simply for professional inputs on how to run an election campaign. She put me in charge of the advertising campaign and at my instance, set up a media committee to address the editorial part of the print media. Later, when television came to the fore, I persuaded Mrs Gandhi to revamp the press conference room into a television-friendly venue.

We struggled through losses in 1998 and 1999. In 2004, I thought I was in the thick of things until some Congress apparatchiks orchestrated a coup to take over. In the American way of saying things, I was shafted.

Even after the 2004 verdict in favor of the Congress, I insisted that that the BJP lost not because of its “India Shining” campaign but because of abundant evidence of bad governance, including the idiotic nuclear blasts in 1998 and the Pramod Mahajan machine of corruption.

The apparatchiks convinced Mrs Gandhi that a “pro-poor” policy was the lesson learned from the 2004 victory.

After that, the Congress lost the plot. Instead of capitalizing on the gains of UPA policies in their first term, they began this errant, arrogant program brought in by Rahul Gandhi, who the apparatchiks saw as their ticket to power for the next decade or more, given he was young.

Trouble was Mr Gandhi brought into his team, bright young sparks from Ivy League universities who had a post-modern view of the world. Imposing policies such as the food security bill, the tribal rights bill, the land acquisition bill that won kudos on highfalutin campuses the world over, Mr Gandhi and his team thought India’s pre-modern voters would buy it and vote the Congress to power again.

It is true that in the West, there is growing intellectual movement against corporate capitalism and questions are being asked the motives and practices of large corporations. In bringing such post-modern issues to the election campaign against the simple message of aspiration Mr Modi purveyed, Mr Gandhi now presides over the ruins of the 130-year old Indian National Congress.

Mr Gandhi and his Ivy League acolytes have presided over the utter decimation of the Grand Old Party founded by Allan Octavian Hume in December 1885.